Objectives of the service
SEED improves the state of the art in energy forecasting accuracy with geopredict’s proprietary Machine Learning technology using satellite Earth Observation data and High Performance Computing, while also catering to the needs of renewable operators in terms of optimizing solar farm‘s operations and maintenance scheduling based on weather and predictive insights. The SEED system provides forecasting capabilities from short-term to long-term as Software-as-a-Service for the Indian renewable energy market, supporting decision making across a wide range of use cases and applications across different time horizons such as intraday and day-to-day market operations, day-ahead energy production forecasting in 15 minute time resolution, scheduling and deviation settlement mechanism regulations compliance, and multiple weeks to months/years-ahead forecasting of system parameters for operational planning, including predictive maintenance and automated maintenance scheduling.
Users and their needs
SEED is designed to tailor to the needs of Indian renewable operators in terms of optimizing solar farm’s operations and maintenance scheduling based on weather and predictive insights generated by the SEED system and on given state regulations.
The project involves the spectrum of large, medium, and small renewable power generation companies:
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A very big player in Solar generation in India with 5 GW total renewable energy assests.
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A smaller renewable generator with and installed capacity of 10 MW.
SEED targets the problem of underperformance of existing renewable energy assets in India, by tackling two main underlying and interlinked issues:
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Non availability of location specific and high-resolved weather/climate models tailored to Indian conditions, affecting performance of existing renewable energy forecasting models, and
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Lack of effective predictive tools for optimization of solar operations tailored to the Indian context.
The main challenge for geopredict lies in identifying and implementing spatially and temporally high resolved sets of atmosphere earth observation data for the Indian Ocean region.
Service/ system concept
The SEED system is designed to provide predictive information for two purposes to the customer:
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Renewable energy production forecast one day ahead in 15-minute time resolution, including 9 intraday revisions
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Medium to long term forecasts in daily, weekly, or monthly time resolution for predictive maintenance and operations planning needs.
The SEED AI self-organizing modeling and forecasting engine processes historical and current EO atmosphere data together with required customer energy production data to get optimized energy forecasting models for each customer on site level for power generation forecasting and predictive maintenance. The result is predictive information delivered to the customer in form of numerical data and reports.
Space Added Value
The project massively uses Satellite Earth Observation (EO) as the main source of information for atmosphere modelling and forecasting, which serves the company’s energy forecasting models as input.
For short-term energy forecasting needs defined by India’s Deviation Settlement Management regulation (DSM) EO data with high temporal resolution (15 minutes) are required. Currently, the system uses EO data products from NOOA/GOES. Using these data for DSM-related energy forecasting based on the SEED model has shown a performance increase (penalty decrease) of up to 44% compared to existing solutions. Once the company gets access to India’s geostationary satellite data products, these data will be tested for forecast performance improvement. The same applies when data of EUMETSAT’s Meteosat Third Generation satellite for the Indian Ocean becomes available.
For longer-term forecasts with lower temporal resolution (days, weeks, months, years) for predictive maintenance the project will test public EO data products of COPERNICUS CAMS, CMEMS, and C3S. Here, both surface and pressure level data with a spatial resolution of 0.125° will be considered.
Current Status
The SEED demonstration project has been successfully completed with all the SEED forecasting available to the customers through login in the geopredict website https://dashboard.geopredict.eu/login .
The important analytics display on SEED dashboard which includes:
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Intra-Day revision analytics till every upload time for a day: Actual and forecasted power generation, penalties, revision status, percentage error above the allowed blocks, production efficiency, forecast deviation every revision, and penalties per MWh for different time periods.
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A live graph plotting actual vs forecasted power generation values, and they are updated in every revision.
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Penalties every day and monthly in comparison to the last year values (when available) for the same time period.
